dave winer

Part 1 of Rant - Recommendations from Yelp, foursquare, etc  are useless because there's no way to validate expertise and no identity

social+local+expert data = relevant recommendations aka Yelp, Foursquare, urban spoon, etc are walled garden data silos of doom NOT destiny and they don't really help you find the awesome restaurant  or espresso g*d shot you are looking for despite Fred Wilson's experience (an exception that proves the rule)

Part 2 of Rant - Don't trust your review data not to be compromised and not to be deleted when using a service like Yelp, foursquare, etc

You may be elite-2011-taster-273487 on yelp or urban spoon but or other such location based or recommendation based service, but:

1. you don't own your data e.g. your reviews
2. you can't export your data
3. why should anybody believe that it's you or trust your reviews when it's impossible to figure out who you are e.g. who is JudyS_240394 ?
4. your data will be sold (only Apple seems to have the guts not to sell user data)
5. what happens when the wonderful service goes out of business or "pivots"? 

Part 3 of Rant - Solutions - for now: copy to your site, future: open formats are the only long term way to get out of the silo

It's unfortunate that in 2011 that the best way to build up a consistent reputable, verifiable, track record for reviews or anything else that's structured beyond mere text is still to to have your own site e.g. a blog .

The best pragmatic compromise is to somehow copy the data you post in walled garden data silos of doom back to a site you control on your domain (unfortunately most walled garden sites don't allow you to get your data out without compromise; exceptions that prove the rule: flickr and instagr.am)

Or flip it around: Make your site the master and copy the data out to walled gardens like twitter, yelp, facebook etc is probably a better short term pragmatic solution. Not surprisingly the usual suspects :-) like Dave Winer and Tantek are pioneering this (check out Tantek's falcon system).

And in the long term, a "beyond unstructured blog of text" open API or data format for things like reviews which we have been discussing since 2004 (e.g. microformats) will actually happen. I remain optimistic about that :-) !

Blogging them since otherwise they will get lost in the non transparent Globe and Mail dustbin of history :-)! And by the way, I *do* like the Globe and Mail and can't see myself stopping my print subscription, just think of these as constructive criticisms.

• I don't like Leah McLaren's writing
• I don't like partial text RSS - the teasers in the current Globe RSS feeds aren't that great.
• I don't like the fact that print subscribers don't have full text access to the archive and advance access to future issues.
• A long as I am a print subscriber I should have access to full text RSS feeds (with tasteful, relevant ads if you must!) and the entire archive of the Globe and Mail (or at the very least since I have been a print subscriber since 1998, I should get a 75% discount for access to the archive - the Globe doesn't reward loyal subscribers in any way which is not a way to nurture a community of lifelong subscribers.)
• Please stop your telemarketers from calling me every four months and asking me if I am interested in a New York Times subscription; I love the NYT but I am not interested ! If I was, I'd contact them directly.
• Please get rid of all content from The Economist, NYT, etc and minimize the wire service stuff. I am interested in content from the Globe's writers not re-purposed stuff from other publications.
• Please implement Dave Winer's Checkbox News. Wouldn't it be great if I could click a checkbox that says "No more from Leah McLaren" or no more about Rush :-) ? Seriously it would be great and would drive adoption of your online service.

RSS is the real convergence medium; it's already the transport for multi-media on the web. If you want your audio, video or whatever to get circulated and noticed, the best way to to do this is to put a link to it in an RSS feed with enclosures!

People and organizations who don't blog regularly or who have never blogged (like New Media BC and Anasi) are taking up podcasting and videoblogging. As I have written many times, audio and video blogging or podcasting or vlogging or whatever you want to call it will be bigger than text blogging! You don't need a blog when you have an RSS feed with enclosures do you?

Thanks to Dave Winer for inventing the enclosure tag, Adam Curry for solving the last mile problem (automating the transfer to the iPod) and to the bloggers who who popularized RSS. Oh and I guess I should thank Apple for making podcasting mainstream. I don't like Apple's proprietary in origin RSS extensions for iTunes and Apple's lack of community involvement around those extensions (just like I don't like similar actions from M*crosoft) but on the whole I think Apple's done more good than bad here since I doubt late adopters like Anasi or New Media BC would be podcasting and videoblogging without Apple pushing podcasting. (And of course there's nothing wrong with being a late adopter! Go New Media BC go! Go Anasi go!)

Ray Ozzie and Dave Winer are both gurus I respect but no matter how great the Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS are, putting SSE under a Creative Commons license does not make them an open standard. I am very skeptical that non M*crosoft software using SSE will be first class citizens, but I would love to be proven wrong.